'Lives at stake' in tower block with broken lifts
The Grade II listed Balfron Tower in Poplar has 146 flats and maisonettes, and is managed by property management company Way of Life, which has said it is investigating the situation.
Some disabled people had "no option" but to leave their homes, neighbours said, because there was no safe way to get in and out.
One resident, Peter, who posted on social media about the problem, said Way for Life had told him to remove his comment or the company would stop helping him get supplies into the building.
Peter, 58, who did not want to give his surname, cannot use the stairs because of a spinal injury.
He said he knew other tenants who were avoiding using the lifts - when they worked - because they were fearful of them breaking down.
He said he was concerned about safety and that "lives were at stake here".
"What if there is an emergency? What if I have a heart attack? Anyone who can't use the stairs will be in great danger," he said.
Another resident, 22-year-old Vasundhata Gupte, has been forced to climb 15 flights of stairs with a hamstring injury when she returns from medical appointments.
Ms Gupte said she had asked Way for Life about what to do during an emergency and was told they "did not have an answer".
Sophie Ruston can use the stairs - but has to carry her elderly dog up and down to her 21st floor flat.
One lift has been out of order for a week and the other is "temperamental", residents said.
When the second lift broke down, Ms Ruston said "chaos ensued".
She added the situation meant she would finish a 10-hour night shift, during which she was on her feet, and was faced with climbing another 21 flights when she got home.
Way of Life provided a service while both lifts were broken where essential supplies were taken to stranded residents.
A spokesperson said the company had apologised to Peter, and added that "the behaviour outlined to us is very disappointing and absolutely does not reflect the values and conduct to which we aspire as a business".
A number of staff based in the tower had been temporarily removed while the allegations were being investigated, Way of Life said.
The Balfron Tower was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger in 1963 and was built between 1965 and 1967 as part of the Brownfield Estate, an area of social housing.
Way of Life runs a number of residential blocks in London and elsewhere. It currently has eight apartments available for long-term rental at Balfron Tower, ranging from £2,050 per month for a one-bed flat to £3,850 for a three-bedroom home.
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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
Follow the red sauce to Burbank's best Italian deli
When I want to feel closer to my late grandmother — and to my great-aunt, aunts and cousins — I drive to Burbank. I head directly to the cookie case at Monte Carlo Italian Deli, passing beneath the wooden puppets that line the walls, and scan the rows of sweets for pignoli. I wander the aisles, still dumbstruck after all these decades: the countless jars of giardiniera, every twist and shape of dried pasta on offer, the familiar buzz of customers around the deli case all waiting for their number to be called. By my count at least four generations of the Petrucelli line, by blood or by marriage, have loved shopping here, where retro neon signage welcomes you to a cornucopia of Italian excellence. On one side of the building is Monte Carlo, a well-stocked market and importer, and on the other, Pinocchio's: what feels like the last vestige of 1960s red-sauce, cafeteria-style dining. It's a relic and a palace, built of sausage links, frozen manicotti, gasoline-like canisters of olive oil and a confounding Pinocchio theme. It should be made a local landmark and protected for as long as Los Angeles remains standing. Informed by her New Jersey-born mother-in-law, in the '90s my own mother would cart me along to the deli, where the staff would gift me and every child a long, spindly breadstick, as is still their tradition. In adolescence I would line up at Pinocchio's and pick out affordably priced wedges of lasagna and eggplant parmesan or the house-made Italian sausages with wilted green peppers over pasta, always served on muted pink cafeteria trays, and always with my favorite side dish: the tart marinated mushrooms, boiled in vinegar then coated in oil and flecked with spices. Now in adulthood, it's where I find solace and connection to my family. Sometimes I'll meet my cousin Victoria, sipping sub-$5 glasses of wine and sliding into well-worn leather booths in one of the brick- or wood-accented dining rooms. Now expecting her own child — who'll undoubtedly become the fifth generation of our family to fall in love with this magical market — she asks me to send photos of the heaps of garlic bread when unable to muster the strength for her own visit. She doesn't know it yet, but I'll be stopping by for that garlic bread on the way to her baby shower in a few weeks. The legacy of shopping at Monte Carlo isn't limited to the Petrucellis. According to co-owner Tony Scuticchio, many of the customers here are multigenerational; he's seen children grow up and begin their own lineage. He estimates 80% of his patrons live in the San Fernando Valley, but some make the pilgrimage from Las Vegas to shop four or five times a year, while others come from Palm Springs whenever they're in town. 'The customers make it so pleasant,' he says. 'They're so appreciative and they love it. We have a lot of Italians that come in here, old-school Italians, and they even go back to, 'When I was in Italy, we did this,' 'When I was in Italy, I did that.'' It's been a family affair since 1969, when Croatia-born Mark Brankovich Sr. purchased the 1950s-founded Monte Carlo deli. Though not himself Italian, 'He always felt that he was more Italian than the Italians were,' Scuticchio says with a laugh. Brankovich spoke Italian, and lived in Italy during World War II; at one point, the family lore goes, he was arrested by Mussolini's troops, then released after his uncle called in a favor. After moving to the U.S., he never returned. But he did buy an Italian deli along Magnolia Boulevard. In 1971 he also purchased the adjacent liquor store, flipping that into Pinocchio's, and eventually bought the next-door bar to expand his dining room. When he died in 2001, his daughter, Laura, took the reins, and not long after that, she fell in love with Scuticchio, who operates the business. Scuticchio had owned his own grocery stores in Los Angeles and his own father — born in Italy — operated restaurants at the Santa Monica Pier in the 1960s. Sliding in to take over the deli was, he felt, right in line with his own work experience and heritage. Now he and Laura have a 19-year-old daughter who has helped scoop the gelato through the years. Their kitchen whips up 2,500 meatballs and between 3,000 and 4,000 sausages every week, plus 80 gallons of meat sauce and 30 gallons of the marinara each day. Preparation begins at 7 a.m. daily. The bread is made freshly for the deli around the corner, by a bakery that the deli used to also own. But no time is as busy as the holidays, when the deli hums from morning to night. 'Christmastime is so busy because everybody gets back to their roots,' Scuticchio says. 'You have people that say, 'My grandmother used to make lasagna,' or 'My grandmother used to make these raviolis,' 'My grandmother used to make manicotti.' Everybody just gets back to what their family has done. So I think that's really unique.' Some form of stuffed pasta in red sauce can be found on my own family's table, be it Christmas, Thanksgiving or Easter. A few years ago I placed a call to my Aunt Carol, who was organizing the holiday feast; I was heading to Burbank anyway, and would she like me to pick up anything from Monte Carlo for the dinner? No need, she told me. She'd already made the trip for frozen ravioli the day before. Monte Carlo Italian Deli and Pinocchio's are at 3103 W. Magnolia Blvd. in Burbank.
Time Magazine
07-08-2025
- Time Magazine
The Letters My Grandmother Received From Auschwitz
Every year at our family Seder, my dad would pull down a small cedar box from the closet shelf. He'd carry it to the table and lift the lid, releasing the scent of spicy red cedar into the room. Inside were letters, postcards stacked and yellowed with history, written in careful French. At the top corner of each letter: a deep red stamp bearing the profile of Adolf Hitler. 'These were written by my grandfather to my mother,' he would say, 'from Auschwitz.' Then he'd issue his annual warning: 'Every few decades, this happens to the Jews. So always be looking out. Have eyes in the back of your head.' I thought it sounded paranoid. I had never known anything close to antisemitism growing up in Northern California. I wasn't exactly sure what the message these letters held, but they spoke to me. Letter from Avram to Danielle, 1944. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg It was when I turned 40, as I was about to become a father myself, that I felt compelled–by ancestors, by spirit, by responsibility, by the muses–to understand the letters, written both to my grandmother and to the friends looking after her, and to find the story that lived inside their words. My grandmother Fernande Halerie was born in Paris in 1923 to Romanian Jewish immigrants. Her parents, Avram and Marguerite, were sharply dressed tailors. Avram was an amateur poet and her older brother David played the banjo. She loved to roller-skate through the boulevards with her friends. They lived in the bustling 24th arrondissement, part of a thriving immigrant community. Marguerite and Avram circa 1920-1940 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg In 1942, when Fernande was 16, her parents were arrested. They were sent through the Drancy transit camp and loaded onto a cattle car to Auschwitz. The first letter in our collection begins, 'Dear Friends, My wife and I are in a cattle car with no air and no light destined for Poland. I hope that everything is going well at your home with regard to Fernande. Do all that's possible to care for her and keep her at Monique's home. Be brave and we will see you soon.' Slipped through a slot in the cattle car, it arrived days later. Fernande wanted to go with them, but because she was French-born, she wasn't on the list to be deported. They told her to stay behind. So she did. And through the strength, ingenuity, and power of love, she survived. The letters began to arrive from a place called Blechhammer, a forced labor camp in southern Poland, a subcamp of Auschwitz. It turns out my great-grandfather Avram had been pulled from the train with 154 other able-bodied men at the Cosel rail junction. While his wife went on to Auschwitz and was almost certainly gassed upon arrival, Avram was sent as labor to build synthetic-fuel plants for the Nazi war machine. Thanks to his sociable personality, he got a job working at the infirmary away from the hard grind of the plant. He built a black-market network inside the camp, bartering supplies, sewing clothing, and maintaining lines of communication with the outside. He relied on Fernande, his teenage daughter, to move around occupied Paris and gather the packages—food, thread, medicine, perfume—that he needed to stay alive. During the week, Fernande lived alone in the family's Paris apartment under a false name: Danielle Deschampe. The ID card lives in our collection still. On weekends, she stayed with the Pliez family, Catholics who risked their lives to protect her. Their daughter Monique was the same age. They would go to Mass together on Sundays. On Rosh Hashanah of 1944, Fernande met a young American Jewish soldier named David Snegg at the Grand Synagogue in Paris. He didn't speak French and she didn't speak English, but they fell in love. Their romance played out over 120 letters—adorned with lipstick kisses and hand-drawn hearts. 'I kiss your picture so much I'm afraid I'll wear it out,' he wrote. Over 120 letters were sent between Danielle and David. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg Meanwhile, Avram's letters slowed and then stopped. Fernande waited anxiously. She knew Blechhammer had been liberated. She watched other neighbors return. Still, no word. It turns out Avram had survived not only Blechhammer but a two-week death march through the German winter. He passed through Gross-Rosen, then Buchenwald, and finally arrived at Ohrdruf, a subcamp where they were building a grand underground bunker system to hide the Fuhrer. There, Avram's number was recorded on an infirmary card, just days before American troops liberated the camp. Ohrdruf was the first Nazi camp encountered by General Eisenhower. When he saw it, he summoned the press. 'I made the visit deliberately,' he wrote, 'in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.' Avram didn't make it. As the Americans approached, SS guards lined up the prisoners and opened fire. Some survived by falling to the ground. But he was killed. His best friend survived and found Fernande in the apartment in Paris. With him, he carried her father's last words: 'Tell Fernande I love her with all my heart.' Soon after, Fernande and David, with a toddler in tow, said goodbye to the Pliez family and the Parisian community that had helped her survive. They set sail for a new life in Los Angeles. My father was conceived in a Pullman car somewhere between New York and California. Going by her new name, Danielle, she lived in Pasadena and raised two boys. One day, she accompanied a friend to the studio lot of her favorite radio show, Queen for a Day , a game-show-style program where women shared personal stories before a live audience. Whoever told the 'saddest' story, and got the loudest applause, was crowned Queen for a Day. The Queen was granted a special wish and received prizes like a new washer-dryer. My grandmother was chosen to take the stage. When she told her story, the applause-o-meter hit the red and she was crowned Queen for a Day. Her wish? To find out what happened to her parents and brother. The show could not provide her with all the answers, but it did find her father's brother who now lived in Memphis and they became close. She also won a beautiful new patio set. Danielle (second from left) winning Queen for a Day. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg Over the years my father attended to the collection of letters. He had them carefully translated by an expert and had intended to donate them to the Shoah museum in Paris. But when he showed the collection to a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on a trip to Washington, D.C., with his grandchildren, she stopped him. 'This is the largest collection of uncensored letters I've ever seen,' she told him. 'You can't walk out of here with these.' The letters are now safely held at the USHMM, beautifully presented online and available for future generations. My grandmother's story joins the millions of others, from the darkness of a closet shelf into the healing light of remembrance. Now I'm continuing the work. As an artist I set out to dive deep into the letters and embark on a journey of understanding. A path filled with questions. What were the causes and conditions that these letters needed to be written in the first place? How was it that they were able to send and receive packages in a black-market operation? What happened to Avram? What was it like for a 16-year-old girl to be alone in Paris? As I look for the throughlines, the patterns, the arc, the symbols, and the story, what strikes me most is the power and intimacy of a letter, words on a page that cut through time and space, voices perfectly preserved. The horror of the Holocaust is undeniable, but the letters share a message not of paranoia or fear but of hope and courage. They serve as a reminder that life and love triumph over darkness and evil, that a seed, carried far on the winds and currents of history, can find conditions to flourish. Avram didn't survive. But through the deep love between a father and daughter, our family did. Because of that love, I'm here to write these words, to live a life in freedom, and to raise a beautiful son and a daughter of my own.
Los Angeles Times
06-08-2025
- Los Angeles Times
They survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and then they saved the world
You've heard of the hibakusha, although you may not know them by that name. They are the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 80 years ago this month. The word means, roughly, 'bomb-affected people.' Their lives were transformed in a purplish flash of light brighter than 100 suns. It killed many of their loved ones in either a second of excruciating pain, or agonizingly over weeks and months, and left others literally and figuratively scarred for life. About 99,000 hibakusha are still alive, at an average age of 86, according to Nobuhiro Mitsuoka, a Hiroshima-born researcher and former diplomat who works closely with bomb survivors. July marked the first time the number had dropped below 100,000. The living, visceral memories of those August morning nightmares fade as each hibakusha dies, as roughly 7,000 have each year recently. Fewer and fewer people now hear firsthand accounts of the bombings, but we can't let those memories disappear. Because through their suffering, and through their simple act of being, the hibakusha have done something remarkable: They have kept the world safe from nuclear warfare for eight decades, from a war that would surely have been more horrendous than the one they experienced, lit by bombs far more powerful. In other words, the hibakusha have saved your life, and the lives of everyone you have ever known or loved or will ever know or love. The world saw what they endured and, on several occasions, stepped back from repeating it. Today's hibakusha were children in 1945. Now many work as activists, filing lawsuits, holding rallies, telling their stories as living examples of the worst history has to offer. In 2024, an organization of bomb-affected people, the Nihon Hidankyo, won the Nobel Peace Prize. 'No nuclear weapon has been used in war in nearly 80 years,' the Nobel committee noted, crediting the 'extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha.' Here's where we knock wood. With talk of nuclear weapons cropping up more and more often, including in reference to Iran and Ukraine, the need to remember the hibakusha and their experiences — as well the many politicians and government officials who promoted nonproliferation treaties and who are themselves reaching very old age — is more crucial than ever. It will be up to the rest of us to pass those memories down to our children, and to their children, as best as we can. 'They won the Nobel Prize for a reason — they are not just memory keepers, they are activists,' said Joel H. Rosenthal, president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, who has met with these survivors and wrestles with the meaning of their legacy — and what the future holds without them. 'I'm terrified that the lessons are being lost to history,' he said. 'We have no strategic agreements now. And the world is building up its nuclear arms. There's not even a plan to have a discussion. There's nothing. It's every nation for itself. It's terrifying.' For years the hibakusha were shunned even in their own country, a war-ravaged land of ashes eager to put the privations and dark memories of the conflict behind it. To understand their journey, we should wrestle a little with the never-resolvable debate about what led to it. Several recent new works of nonfiction demonstrate how the human race was simultaneously prepared and grievously unprepared for the forces unleashed by the first bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, and how it was the hibakusha who brought the reality home to the rest of the world. These include last year's 'Hiroshima' and the just-released 'Nagasaki' by M.G. Sheftall, both installments subtitled 'The Last Witnesses.' This year also brought 'Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan' by Richard Overy. They join a long line of extraordinary journalism and nonfiction writing that explored these seminal events, including John Hersey's 'Hiroshima,' which helped open the world's eyes to what had transpired on Aug. 6, 1945, in that hilly, seaside city. Some scientists at Los Alamos and in Manhattan had certainly thought deeply about the ramifications. But the military and government authorities running the war in the United States essentially saw them as extra big bombs that would be the end of something — namely, World War II. Few grasped that they were actually the beginning of something: the nuclear age — and the opening of a Pandora's box. Military-industrial inertia had pushed their creation and use ever forward from conception to execution. As Rosenthal notes, practically every other once-accepted moral ceiling, such as a ban on mass bombings of civilians, had been abandoned by warring nations on both sides by mid-1945. In all, as many as 210,000 died in the blasts and the immediate aftermaths. Was the bombs' use justified? That question cannot truly be answered without somehow creating an alternate universe in which the bombs were not used. There are flaws on both sides of the debate. My stepfather fought in the Pacific and told me once that had the war continued he would have been on the first landing craft in Tokyo Bay and surely would have been killed — so he supported the dropping of the bombs. Indeed, as Overy determines in 'Rain of Ruin,' a belief that the bombs would save American lives was the chief reason they were used. But there is no way we can know how many on either side would have died in the absence of the bombs. Others argue that the Japanese were on the brink of surrender, an utterly defeated enemy, and therefore the bombs were unnecessary. This too is not borne out by scholarship. Yes, there was a growing peace faction, but Japan's army still had a tight grip on power and considerable resources on the home islands for a bloody final battle. Its leaders were determined to fight on. Even after Emperor Hirohito recorded a message announcing that Japan would stop fighting — never using the word 'surrender,' mind you — Japanese army zealots attempted a coup. This is all captured in a stunning piece of Japanese journalism rivaling Hersey's, though not as well-known — 'Japan's Longest Day,' in which the staff of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported out every second of the power struggle over whether to accede to Allies' demands, decided in the 24 hours before Hirohito's broadcast at noon on Aug. 15, 1945. In the United States, the announcement of the Hiroshima bomb was initially met with joy. President Truman called it 'the greatest achievement of organized science in history.' But almost immediately, the euphoria cooled. 'In the days since 6 August, a sense of the enormity of the consequences of Hiroshima had darkened the mood of celebration,' the British historian Max Hastings wrote in 2008's 'Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45.' So was born the 'nuclear taboo.' It has had a grip on humanity ever since. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has rattled the nuclear saber, lowering his nation's official threshold for using nuclear weapons in 2024, but has not deployed them against Ukraine, even during disastrous periods for his military. Surely thoughts of the hibakusha and their ordeal have weighed on the minds of all leaders who have had the power to press the red button, and surely these survivors' testimony has contributed to the universal restraint shown for 80 years now. Col. Bryan R. Gibby, an associate professor at West Point, notes that the United States has at high levels considered the use of atomic weapons on several occasions since 1945 — during the Korea and Vietnam wars, including in the siege of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954; the Second Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958; and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s. Each time a mixture of military and political concerns prompted restraint. The military concerns focused on whether the weapons would achieve their goals if detonated in jungles or mountainous regions; there was no guarantee they would, Gibby told me recently. The political concerns, he added, focused on how our allies and the rest of the world would respond to their use. It seems clear to me that these political concerns were directly connected to the hibakusha and the nuclear taboo. The view is shared by those in Japan who work with the survivors to tell their stories. 'I deeply resonate with your view that the hibakusha, through their actions and the trauma they endured, helped save the world from future nuclear conflict,' the researcher Mitsuoka notes. 'The idea that the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave rise to a moral taboo against nuclear weapons — which later served as a deterrent in moments of global tension — is, in my opinion, both significant and historically grounded.' No hibakusha were interviewed for this essay. It would have been easy enough: Many of them make themselves available, and meetings can be arranged. But it would have felt somehow exploitative. Yes, they feel called to tell their story, but surely it is not easy. In 'Hiroshima,' Sheftall notes that even the faint smell of singed hair from the open door of a beauty salon, or the odor of smoke from roasting meat at a street festival, can summon traumatizing memories. 'There is just something distinct and not reproducible about their experience,' Rosenthal said. 'I worry a little bit about instrumentalizing it: 'What does it mean for us?' Who are we to even dare to compare? When you visit Hiroshima, it is about these people and their lives and their tragedy, full stop. It needs to be honored, and the memory kept that way.' So today I'll leave the hibakusha alone. But at the same time, I'll say: Thank you for saving my life. Wendell Jamieson is the author with Joshua A. Miele of 'Connecting Dots: A Blind Life.' He has contributed to Military History Quarterly.
